Friday, 23 November 2007

Day322 Unreal 3 Approacheth & Crysis Editing

Unreal 3 in NovemberThe other big gun (both figuratively and litterally) coming our way in the 3D enginewars is of course Unreal 3. Originally it looked like it would hit our machines before Crysis, but it doesnt look like it is far off now. The Unreal 3 site has a nice quality version of their trailer and it is very very impressive - the Youtube versions of it have too much compression going on and it really muddies the beauty that is in there.[a nice screenshot from the unrealtournament3 site - shrunk to 800]

The box and moddingJust like my edition of Crysis having a few extra goodies, the Collectors edition of UT3 gives us some nice things to look forward to (from the UT3 site:- Bonus Packaging: Tin Box- Bonus Content: Collectible Hard Cover UT3 Art Book- Bonus DVD: 10+ hours of Unreal Engine 3 Toolkit Video Tutorials- The History of Unreal Tournament- Behind the Scenes of UT3

It is a good sign for how moddable it might be if it ships with the tutes already. UT2004 was very approachable for creating things for visualisation, this may be even better. Looking at the gameplay vids it still looks like a charge around and shoot kinda game, nit really my cup of tea. That said something like Team Fortress 2 could be fun for a bit. I wonder if you can have bots in UT3 for things like capture the flag??

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Crysis EditorFiring up the editor again to have a play, I thought it would come easily, but it wasnt nearly so intuitive for me (not sure why). After a little hunting on the modding/tutorial sites for Crysis I came across the CryENGINE 2 Manual - obvious place to start really - and it works!This little pic shows me creating my first little island - just mucking around really - but still super cool.[screenshot of me making my first play-island in the CryENGINE2 Sandbox 2 editor]

Note that if CTRL-G doesnt throw you into your nice new map - just reload the editor and if it behaves like mine it will work second time around.

Who is this Oinkfrog person?

AKA Graham Hannah (Sydney Australia), yes just a guy who is diving into all the related realms of Digital Creativity and documenting it here.
I am currently the IT Manager for both Built Environment and Law at UNSW - supporting a design-centric set of IT services and infrastructure. I have completed my Masters of Digital Media and the future should see even more creative output from me...